Blackbirds Singing in The Dead of Night

And then they said, ‘Let the blackbirds fly!’ 

They say that history has a way of repeating itself, over and over and over again until it is not history anymore. They also said that blackbirds were for the damned. The damned meaning those who had done but so much bad that there good was overshadowed. I always wondered why the blackbirds followed me around, ever since I was a child. I always wondered why I would be avoided like the plague except for my grandmother who stuck to me like hair on a balloon.  Was I not good? Was I not just a child? These questions still haunt my very existence yet now when I look behind me, I seem to miss those blackbirds, which filled the sky, preventing even a drop of sunlight to touch my skin. Maybe that is why I have skin so translucent that you can see my veins. ‘Is it true,’ I once asked my grandmother, ‘that blackbirds are an omen of all the bad in the world?’ She looked up from her book; she was reading the Canterbury Tales, and stared at me as if I had asked her the worst question one can possibly ask another person. She shook her head and went back to reading. That was the last I ever asked of these questions. As I grew older, the number of blackbirds following me around started dwindling until only one was left. On my 15^th birthday, even the last went away and I was left alone only for my grandmother to keep me company. All I had of the blackbirds were memories and magic tattoos that appeared on my arm each birthday. We stopped moving cities and towns and villages. The place we stopped didn’t have a name nor was it on any map. All it had were rocky cliffs overlooking the sea and dark woods at every corner. I absolutely adored it. The final house we moved into looked like one of those castles from old horror movies. My grandmother chose the wing overlooking the gardens and I chose the one overlooking the sea. I thought that maybe this place wouldn’t be so bad; that maybe everything would finally be normal but normal didn’t have a place in my life. What I didn’t realize was that the day we stepped into the town, we shook the ground.